RRND Email Full Text (Scheduled)


  • Telemedicine could be taken away from us if Congress doesn’t act soon

    Source: The Hill
    by Ryan Nadelson

    “For nearly five years, pandemic-era waivers allowed patients to receive telehealth visits from home under Medicare and most commercial plans. That flexibility ended on September 30, 2025 when Congress failed to renew permanent parity. Beginning October 1, a patient’s home no longer counted as an eligible originating site for most non behavioral medical visits, with only a narrow set of mental health exceptions. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services did not ban telemedicine — it simply stopped paying for it. In modern health care, that is the same result. Regional insurance plans followed, affecting more than thirty million Medicare beneficiaries who used telehealth last year. They all risk losing access again in a matter of weeks.” (11/20/25)

    https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/5609210-telemedicine-is-quietly-being-undone-and-its-a-big-mistake/

  • What impact does political entrepreneurship have on freedom and flourishing?

    Source: Freedom and Flourishing
    by Winton Bates

    “Some readers will come to this series with the prior belief that political entrepreneurship has a negative impact on freedom and flourishing. Those of us who believe that people tend to flourish most fully when governments refrain from interfering with their lives may hold that belief. We certainly have good reasons to be skeptical about the impact of political entrepreneurs on human flourishing. Nevertheless, if we are serious about promoting libertarian ideals, we cannot avoid considering the possibility that political entrepreneurship might have a role to play in getting us from where we are now – or where we seem to be heading – to a political and legal order that is more conducive to human flourishing.” (11/20/25)

    https://www.freedomandflourishing.com/2025/11/what-impact-does-political.html

  • The Vibecession Deepens

    Source: Paul Krugman
    by Paul Krugman

    “I noted last week that the Biden era vibecession — people feeling bad about an economy that looked good by standard measures — has persisted under Trump. In fact, public perceptions of the economy appear to be plumbing new depths. Honestly, I’m surprised. One factor in poor economic sentiment under Biden was partisanship. People’s reported perception of the economy is strongly affected by whether their preferred party is in power …. This is true for both parties, but historically Republicans have tended to cheer harder and boo louder than Democrats. So other things equal we would have expected average sentiment to improve under Trump II. Now, things aren’t equal. Objectively, the economy is worse in important ways than it was a year ago. Still, the extent of the plunge in perceptions is remarkable.” (11/20/25)

    https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-vibecession-deepens

  • Separating Some Terms

    Source: EconLog
    by Kevin Corcoran

    “Political views are often misleadingly discussed as though they span a single left/right spectrum. I want to suggest that a similar mistake gets made when thinking about economic systems and policies. As a corrective, consider that economic systems can be understood along more than one axis or spectrum – and these different axes are often conflated with each other. Here I propose four axes for evaluating a country’s economic system. Each axis should be thought of as a sliding scale, rather than a binary switch. It’s not a matter of if a country is entirely on this or that side, it’s a question of what side the balance tends toward.” (11/20/25)

    https://www.econlib.org/econlog/separating-some-terms/

  • The New Medievals

    Source: Quillette
    by Claire Lehmann

    Since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, podcaster and influencer Candace Owens has floated a succession of conspiracy theories implicating everyone in the murder, from the Israeli government to Kirk’s own organisation, Turning Point USA. This week, her speculation reached its apogee when she suggested that Donald Trump himself was involved. In a recent broadcast, Owens linked the commemorations of Kirk’s death to a supposed plot, remarking that ‘when they give you a holiday and a boulevard … they definitely killed you.’ Owens’[s] wild theorising isn’t an anomaly; it’s part of something older and darker. There’s a distinctly medieval quality to much of the conspiratorial right—a world animated by unseen cabals, moral corruption, and divine punishment disguised as politics.” (11/20/25)

    https://quillette.com/2025/11/20/the-new-medievals-candace-owens-charlie-kirk-conspiracy/

  • Inherited Economies

    Source: CounterPunch
    by Dean Baker

    “Donald Trump may not be able to remember what things were like five years ago, when he handed the economy and the country to Joe Biden, but it is important that the rest of us do. As in so many other areas where Trump tries to turn reality on its head, he pushes the story of Biden inheriting a great economy, which he then wrecked. The reality is the opposite, Biden turned around an economy in shambles due to the pandemic, and handed off an economy that was widely touted as the envy of the world.” (11/20/25)

    https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/11/20/inherited-economies/

  • How To Talk Politics at Thanksgiving Without Causing a Family Feud

    Source: ProSocial Libertarians
    by Andrew Jason Cohen

    “The suggestion that we should not discuss the controversial topic du jour is now often defended with claims about how it is uncivil or disrespectful to disagree with anyone or to bring up controversial issues that are sure to encourage disagreement. Despite the popularity of this view, it is a mistake. Not only is the avoidance policy a fool’s game, destined to fail regardless, but it is also misguided from the outset. … The reason the animosity festers is that if you refuse to allow yourself to disagree with someone, you’re essentially accepting that they are not capable or worthy of honest discourse.” (11/20/25)

    https://prosociallibertarians.substack.com/p/how-to-talk-politics-at-thanksgiving

  • Fixing a Failed Political System

    Source: The Dispatch
    by Doug Bandow

    “The United States political system is failing. Expanding political divisions have been exacerbated by the machinations of a political class unwilling to sacrifice its prerogatives, irrespective of the nation’s desperate needs. For a time, the gerontocracy controlling political affairs in Washington seemed to mimic that in Moscow prior to the Soviet regime’s collapse. … There is no simple fix to what is genuinely a looming crisis, in contrast to the many faux emergencies proclaimed by politicians to advance their usually prosaic partisan ends. However, one idea worth trying is an older, somewhat dated one: congressional term limits.” (11/20/25)

    https://thedispatch.com/debates/congress-term-limits-reform-accountability-elections/

  • The trouble with the Nuremberg Trials, 80 years on

    Source: spiked
    by James Woudhuysen

    “Nuremberg was more than a courtroom drama. For more than 10 months, the Allies not only ensured that some kind of justice was done there. They also contained the populist and radical worldwide atmosphere of anti-fascism immediately after the war, by making justice seen to be done. … Nuremberg, then, amounted to a juridical attack on evil. To its credit, the tribunal recognised the extraordinarily monstrous deeds of the Nazis. To its discredit, and despite its key charge of conspiracy, it tended to convert the historical experience of fascism into a timeless morality play …” (11/20/25)

    https://archive.is/LCLg5

  • Socialism Is a Political Doctrine, Not an Economic One

    Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
    by Wulliam L Anderson

    “The doctrines of socialism have been with us for more than 150 years, but no one had really tried it in a total way until the advent of the Soviet Union from the 1920s to the early 1990s. During that period, a number of communist/socialist revolutions occurred in Asia, Cuba, and Africa, all of which provided a laboratory to observe how these socialist economies would perform. The socialist economies failed spectacularly, as Ludwig von Mises had predicted. … But despite socialism’s many failures as an economic system, it is more popular than ever as a political system.” (11/20/25)

    https://mises.org/mises-wire/socialism-political-doctrine-not-economic-one

  • This Is What Businessman Rule Looks Like

    Source: Common Sense
    by Paul Jacob

    “President Trump is doing something many of his supporters said they wanted him to do: act not like a normal politician but like a businessman, for Americans, as if we were stockholders in a for-profit company. Bring in the dough. Efficiently. … That’s never been the recipe for republican governance and can so easily and quickly devolve into plutocratic socialism-for-the-rich. There’s no shouting ‘limited government’ about what Trump boasts of regarding ‘the deals’ he makes for the U.S. For ‘us.'” (11/20/25)

    https://thisiscommonsense.org/2025/11/20/businessman-rule/

  • Burisma, Meet Your Brother Binance

    Source: RealClearPolitics
    by Debra Saunders

    “I’ll admit it: I’ve held President Donald Trump to a different standard than former President Joe Biden when it comes to financial entanglements. Why? For all their ‘Middle Class Joe’ values, Biden and his family — notably, grabby son Hunter — apparently set out to cash in on Biden’s time in public office and after he served as vice president. Hence Hunter Biden’s $2 million pay during 2013 and 2014 as he worked for Ukraine energy concern Burisma. Trump’s money situation was different during his first term. Trump entered the White House a billionaire. The newly elected commander-in-chief lost loads of money during his first four years in the White House …. Trump seems unconcerned about the appearance of conflicts of interest the second time around. Could crypto, then, become his ‘cryptonite?'” (11/20/25)

    https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2025/11/20/burisma_meet_your_brother_binance_153553.html

  • The Opportunity Costs of Our War in Somalia

    Source: Libertarian institute
    by Joseph Solis-Mullen

    “For more than two decades, the United States has waged a quiet, little-noticed air and special operations war across the Horn of Africa. If most Americans are unaware of this fact, that is no accident. The campaign in Somalia has been conducted so far from public view, and with so little meaningful debate in Washington, that its continuation today is treated almost as a bureaucratic inevitability—a policy in search of a justification, defended out of habit rather than necessity. For there is no rational reason for the United States to be bombing Somalia at all. The entire enterprise stands as a textbook example of how inertia, institutional self-interest, and the perverse incentives of the national security bureaucracy combine to produce destructive policies that accomplish nothing for the American people.” (11/20/25)

    https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-opportunity-costs-of-our-war-in-somalia

  • The CPI as Evidence of Methodological Error

    Source: Cobden Centre
    by Keith Wilkinson

    “The quantitative perspective used the mathematical precision expected in the natural sciences like physics and chemistry to model and predict the economy. The qualitative perspective viewed economics as no less rigorous, but restrained economic thought to a study of human behavior and markets. The quantitative shift has continued well into the 20th century with Keynesianism, neoclassical economics, and monetarism, and has spurred the development of a host of new economic statistics. One such statistic is the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and is an example of this methodological error that abandoned the qualitative methodology in favor of a quantitative approach.” (11/20/25)

    https://www.cobdencentre.org/2025/11/the-cpi-as-evidence-of-methodological-error/

  • Donald Trump Zelensky Putin Trump’s ’28-point plan’ for Ukraine War provokes political earthquake

    Source: Responsible Statecraft
    by Anatol Lieven

    “When it comes to the reported draft framework agreement between the US and Russia, and its place in the Ukraine peace process, a quote by Winston Churchill (on the British victory at El Alamein) may be appropriate: ‘Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’ This is because at long last, this document engages with the concrete, detailed issues that will have to be resolved if peace is to be achieved.” (11/20/25)

    https://responsiblestatecraft.org/trump-plan-ukraine-war/

  • Franco’s Legacy at 50

    Source: Foundation for Economic Education
    by Mark Nayler

    “Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Spain has been celebrating all year, with a calendar of educational and cultural events intended ‘to highlight the great transformation achieved in this half-century of democracy.’ Inaugurating the ‘Spain in Liberty’ program in January, Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez said: ‘You don’t need to have a particular ideology, to be on the left, in the center, or on the right, to regard with enormous sadness and terror the dark years of Francoism.’ You don’t, but it certainly helps. ‘Liberty in Spain’ deserves praise for innovatively addressing a complicated issue; but it has also highlighted deep-set disagreement over how Spain should confront its past—and even whether doing so is necessary.” (11/20/25)

    https://fee.org/articles/francos-legacy-at-50/

  • ‘More Horrific Than Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo’: The Unsalvageable Depravity of Israel’s Prisons for Palestinians

    Source: Antiwar.com
    by Andy Worthington

    “On June 19, 2024, Khaled Mahajneh, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, became the first lawyer to visit a notorious detention facility for Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, located inside the Sde Teiman military base in the Negev Desert, one of several detention facilities established after October 7, 2023 to hold Palestinians seized in Gaza. Speaking to +972 Magazine a week after his visit, Mahanjeh drew a pertinent comparison with the treatment of Muslim prisoners in the US’s post-9/11 ‘war on terror,’ but concluded that Israel’s behavior was even worse.” (11/20/25)

    https://original.antiwar.com/worthington/2025/11/19/more-horrific-than-abu-ghraib-and-guantnamo-the-unsalvageable-depravity-of-israels-prisons-for-palestinians/

  • Democrats start falling for risk-takers as their early 2028 conversation begins

    Source: Semafor
    by David Weigel

    The shutdown was its own risk — but not one that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had a real choice on, after the blowback to his decision to fund the government in March. Schumer’s camp kept insisting that he didn’t want to reopen without a cleaner victory on health care, but the defection of his centrists underscored that the risk hadn’t paid off. Since the shutdown ended, Democrats who are behaving like potential presidential candidates have been lining up to argue that their party gave in because its Senate leaders were too cautious. … As the party’s base demands more brawls and more risks, Democrats in power are trying to catch up.” (11/19/25)

    https://www.semafor.com/article/11/19/2025/democrats-start-falling-for-risk-takers-as-their-early-2028-conversation-begins

  • Why We’re All Winning Bigly In Trump’s War With MTG — and We Won’t Tire of Winning

    Source: The Daily Beast
    by Michael Ian Black

    “I think Marjorie Taylor Greene is a loathsome, self-serving narcissist. But if she can make life even one iota more unpleasant for the current President of the United States, then I say go for it, mean girl. Go for it all the live long day.” (11/19/25)

    https://archive.is/RgX4u

  • How to Destroy a Multibillion-Dollar Industry at Lobbyists’ Request

    Source: The Dispatch
    by Scott Lincicome

    “A few months ago, an impromptu trip to my neighborhood wine store turned into an awesome lesson in spontaneous order, American entrepreneurship, and creative destruction. There, I met several small-business owners who were proudly sampling their new products and eager to tell me all about them, their upstart businesses, and the booming local industry to which they belonged. Being a dork, I drank up their stories for almost an hour …. these happy folks weren’t selling beer or wine — they were selling THC-infused drinks that’ve become all the rage at local stores, breweries, bars, and restaurants here in North Carolina, thanks to nothing more than consumer interest, good ol’ fashioned American industriousness, and the federal government getting out of the way. Now, that same government is putting these and many other entrepreneurs out of business — and for no good reason.” (11/19/25)

    https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/capitolism/congress-hemp-ban-thc-seltzers/

  • The Trump Steamroller Is Broken

    Source: The Atlantic
    by Jonathan Lemire

    “President donald trump’s administration has been embroiled in scandal and sloppiness. His own party has defied his political pressure. His senior staff has been beset by infighting. He has sparred with reporters and offered over-the-top praise to an authoritarian with a dire human-rights record. A signature hard-line immigration policy has polled poorly. And Republicans have begun to brace themselves for a disastrous midterm election. That was 2017. But it’s also 2025.
    Ten months into the president’s second term, Trump 2.0 is for the first time starting to resemble the chaotic original. And that new sense of political weakness in the president has not just emboldened Democrats who have been despondent for much of the past year. It’s also begun to give Republicans a permission structure for pushing back against Trump and jockeying for power with an eye to the elections ahead. This was not the plan.” (11/19/25)

    https://archive.is/CluLy

  • Give It Up, Folks: Donald Trump Will Escape Justice for Epstein Too

    Source: The New Republic
    by Brynn Tannehill

    “When the shutdown ended, Arizona Democratic Representative Adelita Grijalva was finally sworn in, 50 days after she was elected. She promptly signed the discharge petition to release the full Epstein files, getting it past 218 signatures and forcing a vote in the House. Democrats were jubilant in the expectation that this would finally expose Trump and bring us to a point where Republicans are perhaps forced to remove him from office — or at least forced to reckon with his moral deficiencies. The problem is, even assuming the best case for Democrats (and the worst for Trump), and even though every House Republican but one hopped on the ‘release the files’ bandwagon, neither of these things are likely to ever happen.” (11/19/25)

    https://newrepublic.com/article/203379/trump-escape-justice-epstein-files

  • The New AI Consciousness Paper

    Source: Astral Codex Ten
    by Scott Alexander

    “Most discourse on AI is low-quality. Most discourse on consciousness is super-abysmal-double-low quality. Multiply these — or maybe raise one to the exponent of the other, or something — and you get the quality of discourse on AI consciousness. It’s not great. … But a rare bright spot has appeared: a seminal paper published earlier this month in Trends In Cognitive Science, Identifying Indicators Of Consciousness In AI Systems.” (11/19/25)

    https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-new-ai-consciousness-paper

  • Voting is tied to more tolerance in men — but less in women

    Source: Expression
    by Chapin Lenthall-Cleary

    “I recently wrote about the significant gender tolerance gap. That naturally raises another question: are there controllable factors that actually help make people better or worse on this front? One obvious candidate is political involvement. Maybe political participation broadens people’s exposure to clashing viewpoints and forces them to wrestle with ideas they’d otherwise ignore. Maybe it teaches civic virtues like freedom of expression. Or maybe it simply funnels them into ideological echo chambers where bad habits grow and tempers get sharp. Turns out both stories might be true — just not for the same genders …” (11/19/25)

    https://expression.fire.org/p/voting-is-tied-to-more-tolerance